Blog Roll

AROUND THE WEB

Optalysys, a UK technology company, says it's on-target to demonstrate a novel optical computer, which performs calculations at the speed of light. If all goes to plan, Optalysys says it will have a 340-gigaflop prototype ready to go soon. .. from Extremtech

A group of engineers at Stanford has developed an iPad-sized, highly power-efficient way of simulating a million neurons and billions of synapses for as low as US$400. The breakthrough could both help our understanding of the brain and help develop a new generation of bionic limbs that are controlled by the patient's brain in real time with little effort at all.

The fervent apostles Nodejs have been very loud promoting server-side JavaScript. And indeed it is light weight, and fast/responsive by avoiding thread blocking by having callbacks passed as the last argument.

However beyond demos when writing 'real' applications you quickly end up indented off the right hand margin. In a sane light there is a huge challenge in readability and maintainability of nodejs applications.

There is also an incredibly active community, including Koa is an expressive middleware for node.js using generators to make web applications and APIs more enjoyable to write and read.

An example: the app.callback method returns a handler that is compatible with Node’s http.createServer method, and uses co:

The ARM Cortex A15 quad-core processor, ECX-2000 delivers twice the performance, three times the memory bandwidth, and four times the memory capacity of the earlier ground-breaking ECX-1000.

It is highly scalable thanks to the integrated 80GB Fleet Fabric switch. The embedded Fleet Engine simultaneously provides out-of-band control and intelligence for autonomic operation and power optimization.

Cassandra has been the wildly popular key value (nosql) database due to it's performance and scalability. The announcements for Cassandra 2.0 claim offer more traditional database features as well as means to integrate with large event processing engines.

Adapteva announced that the first “beta” units of the 16 core 'super computer' are being shipped to the early kicstarter 'developer' backers. Other backers are said to receive their boards by summer's end “after some final refinements.”

Also Adapteva has now opened up general pre-orders for the 16-core version on its website. While all Kickstarter-bought boards will bear a Zynq-7020 SoC, new pre-orders are configured with a 7010 as standard,

However, newcomers will receive “Gen-1” boards, which will offer slight improvements over earlier versions, such as reduced power consumption and an added serial port three-pin header.

The basic 16-core board going for $99 on the online store , with an expected October delivery date. The company tells us the 64-core version will also be available for public consumption, with pre-orders beginning in Q4 this year.

With data volumes and pressure to reduce power all increasing, it is back to the future with NCSA380 Petabyte High Performance Storage System. The world’s largest automated near-line data repository which has multiple automated tape libraries, dozens of high-performance data movers, a large 40 Gigabit Ethernet network, hundreds of high-performance tape drives, and about a 100,000 tape cartridges.

The system is being used with the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer making it the world’s largest HPSS now in production,

Google released a new version of the Dart2js compiler, whose generated JavaScript which they claim outperforms a “hand-written JavaScript” in the DeltaBlue benchmark. Skipping for a moment the difficulty of defining “hand written”
Dart is still dragging it's heels in other benchmarks for the Richards benchmark, the other benchmark that the Dart site publishes, the Dart-generated JavaScript performance for the Richards benchmark is still 26% slower than hand-written JavaScript.

Perhaps more interestingly is to compare Dart with other languages in which it is doing pretty well

“Resistance is futile ..!!” The major leading memory makers, namely Micron, Samsung and Hynix are co-developing the technology development efforts backed by the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMC). The technology, called a Hybrid Memory Cube, will stack multiple volatile memory dies on top of a DRAM controller.

These 3 dimensional chips will rely on the relatively new silicon VIA (Vertical Interconnect Access) technology as their inter connect.

The first Hybrid Memory Cube specification will deliver 2GB and 4GB of capacity, providing aggregate bi-directional bandwidth of up to 160GBps compared with DDR3′s 11GBps of aggregate bandwidth and DDR4, with 18GB to 20GB of aggregate bandwidth.